United States botanist. Barton Holland Warnock was born in Christoval, Texas, and grew up on his family's alfalfa farm in Fort Stockton. Star running back on his high school football team, he was offered a scholarship to Sul Ross State Teachers College in Alpine, where he majored in botany because he 'wanted to chase around the desert'. He went on to earn a master's degree from the University of Iowa and a PhD in plant ecology from the University of Texas at Austin, for his dissertation A Vegetational Study of the Glass Mountains. He joined the faculty of his alma mater in 1946, the next year becoming chair of the biology department. When he retired in 1979, with the rank of Distinguished Professor Emeritus, the science building was named in his honour.
An authority on the flora of the trans-Pecos, known by nearly everyone in the region as 'Doc', Barton devoted much of his retirement to assembling ranch herbaria so that ranch owners and their managers knew what was growing on their land and where. About 1600 of his specimens from Big Bend Ranch are housed at the Barton Warnock Environmental Center in Big Bend Ranch State Park, Lajitas, an interpretation and education facility about the Chihuahuan Desert. He authored and co-authored over 20 publications, the most renowned being his books on wildflowers. He was greatly embittered, however, when his trans-Pecos flora project was rejected by his peers because it conflicted with the appearance of Correll and Johnston's A Manual of the Vascular Plants of Texas.
Alienated from the systematic community, he gave up collecting duplicates or loaning specimens of his holdings, even refusing to allow visitors to examine the herbarium sheets in situ. But he continued to collect, amassing over 26,000 numbers from West Texas and Northern Mexico, many of them previously undescribed species, more than a dozen of which were subsequently named after him, including Noelloydia warnockii, Justicia warnockii, Bouteloua warnockii, Mimosa warnockii, Senecio warnockii and Hexalectris warnockii. He died aged 86 of an apparent heart attack while driving home from a day of plant collecting near Alpine.
Sources:
B.A. Johnston, 1998, "Barton H. Warnock: 1911-1998", HerbalGram, 44: 62
B. Turner, 1998, "Barton H. Warnock, 1911-1998", Plant Science Bulletin, 44(3).
